When The Mountain Goats' founder John Darnielle was a teenager, he went through a self-destructive phase.
"Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself," Darnielle tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I really, really did not want to be in my own skin. I really wanted to get high and stay high."
The singer-songwriter's parents divorced when he was 5 years old, and he was abused by his stepfather. Darnielle says he had the feeling of "being uprooted a lot and not being able to make friends and keep them."
"It was a chaotic environment that I was a child in," he says, "and it makes you angry after a while."
Darnielle writes literary lyrics for his band, often telling stories about fictional characters or stories from his life, and he has expanded beyond lyrics into novels. His new book, Wolf in White Van, is about a man who, at the age of 17, shoots himself in the face with his father's rifle, expecting to die. He survives with chronic pain and a face so disfigured he seldom ventures into public, but he always preferred to live in his head anyway.
[For more of this story go to http://www.npr.org/2014/09/17/...an-writes-about-pain]
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